Thirty Seconds Over Bludhaven
by Santanico
Summary: A bleak walking tour of the city Nightwing has chosen to make his home.


Disclaimer: I don't own Bludhaven or anything else in the DC Universe. Lyrics to "Heartbreak Hotel" were written by Mae B. Axton/Tommy Durden/Elvis Presley. The fic itself is mine to have and to hold until death do us part.  
  
  
  
_Thirty Seconds Over Bludhaven_  
  
By: Santanico  
  
  
  
If you want to imagine the city of everyone's future, imagine the depths of the ocean during a rainstorm. Rusted metal drums of unmentionable substances gleam darkly in the muted light, cast into shadow by the silent bodies of undersea behemoths. Schools of silver fish whirl past, around and through the cracked ribs of a human skeleton, cast now in green moss, its eye sockets cavernous hollows. In the shadow of a barnacled rock, malevolent orange eyes gleam. And all around, the silence.  
  
Just as the sound of the rain that churns and boils the black sea above will never penetrate through to these soundless depths, nor will any light ever be seen in the city that overlooks the raging, fetid waters. Bludhaven slants slightly towards the ocean, as if eagerly anticipating its own demise, hoping that it might crumble into the sea. There is nowhere to hide from this city's inexorable decay; from the day you arrive in Bludhaven to the day you die on its cobblestone streets, you are already tumbling into the darkness.  
  
The streets of Bludhaven wait. They breathe in the lamplit air, and the smell of salt and sweet, sickly rot rises from the very concrete. The narrow alleys absorb not even the flickering, failing light of the lamp- posts, black holes of sinister promise. The sound of a footstep in these curving, fractured streets is deafening, and is echoed only in whispers: the fluttering of wings, a foghorn out to sea, the omnipresent dull roar of the water, a human voice that wakes you, and you drown.  
  
Shingles clatter gently in the wind, rain spattering down their cheaply- painted wooden surfaces. Bait stores. Grocery shops. Bars, lots of bars; the demand for escape is strong in Bludhaven, and anyone who has lived here long enough knows that there is no escape but that found at the bottom of a bottle. Even in this weather, it can be rightly assumed that at any moment, at least two uniformed police officers will stumble out, arms around one another for support, all rumpled clothes and five-o-clock shadow and bleary eyes. The official motto is 'To Protect And Serve', but long ago, the Bludhaven cops discovered a motto they liked more: 'Better To Reign In Hell Than Serve In The 'Haven'.  
  
They'll go on from here. If you wanted to be optimistic, you could say that they'll go back to patrol, or to their wives and families. It's more likely that they'll wind up in the meat-market district. Red-lipped women crawl through the wreckage there, the wreckage of warehouses with smashed spider- web windows and lurid purple and green graffiti on their gray walls. Former slaughterhouses, the ghosts of squealing pigs and screaming cows can be heard in the tortured cries of ecstasy that reverberate off their walls now. The women, white and black and brown skin visible through ripped lace and cheap fishnet, make-up covering their bruised arms and legs, the track- marks hardly visible in the dim light, stalk through the corridors these buildings create, glaring around them with no hope but that business will be swift and brisk tonight. Some of them are not women, but beautiful boys, and they glow with the lumniscent inner light of innocence left to spoil; their eyes are enormous and soft, dulled with the heroin high.  
  
From here it is a short walk to the town square. The hushed and broken heart of Bludhaven, it seems the entire city gathers around this small and lonely little square, all the buildings encroaching upon it, shutting out the rest of the world. A cracked and broken water fountain, once surely magnificent, stands in the center; its mythological figure, Icarus, soars over concrete waves, stone wings designed in such a way that, when the fountain is bubbling, great slicks of white and silver water stream off and away from them, leaping joyously from Icarus' arching body. The fountain has been switched off for the last twelve years, and we all know what happened to Icarus in the end.  
  
Let's move away from here. The silence is beginning to close in upon us.  
  
Through a maze of broken streets and accompanied by the stinging, metallic rain, you can find your way quickly to the Zee Moores. A forest of steel and granite, climbing high like poisonous weeds above the miasma of filth and rain, tarnished ivory towers for the 'Haven's luckiest, its most successful, its most vicious. You can almost taste their presence here, in the black and expressionless eyes of the buildings, windows staring down onto the streets below, more menacing than any threat. Long after everything else is gone, swept into the sea, they will be here.  
  
Small-time dealers cower in the rubble around these monuments to the city's powers; straggly hair in cruel and desperate eyes, bundled eternally in second-hand rags, they scuttle through the alleyways and around the feet of these decadent metal gods looking for all the world like the wharf rats that dwell in every Bludhaven house and home. The Zee Moores are a hall of mirrors for them; every time someone new enters the neighborhood, they rush to them, hopeful and hungry, only to fall back in disappointment when they see that it is only another one of them. Nobody comes to the Zee Moores nowadays except the kind of people who come to the Zee Moores.  
  
Alone on the street again, except not; this time a song, sweet and wavering, floating on the decaying air. Through the miasma of rain a dash of rainbow color: a young hooker strayed from the meat-market, green jacket and pink hair and electric-blue skirt, on her way home, singing in a voice that echoes off the slimy walls and shuttered windows, trying to keep herself warm and stave off the terrifying silence, the song accompanied by the click-click-click of her ill-fitting heels:  
  
And though it's always crowded  
  
You still can find some room  
  
Where broken hearted lovers  
  
Do cry away their gloom.  
  
Her voice fades away, a spectre in the night, as she vanishes down a side alley and away from all sight and sound.  
  
Around the corner from here is the entrance to the train station. A shambling patchwork of brick, the stench of urine and diesel engines rising up through underground grates, warm steam oozing onto the pavement. Beneath the ground a network, a civilisation of platform await, though nobody is there; nobody would dare. Rats skitter over the tracks, and garbage whirls and dances through the air, trapped in the drafts. Every so often, a signal sounds, the platform shiver and shake as if in an oncoming earthquake, and a grimy metal serpent screams through the quiet caverns, its sides tattooed with gang tags, golden eyes beaming light across the tracks. This is the most hopeful spot in all of Bludhaven: you can go away now. You can go anywhere from here. You should be anywhere _but_ here. Through the smeared glass of the train windows, you can see the passengers. To a man or woman, they all wear identical expressions of relief - if they are leaving. If they are arriving, they look like ashen-faced prisoners doomed to execution. They get off with heavy steps, chained down by their own dread.  
  
Up the filthy stairs and back on the street. We'll wander down, now, as if there were anywhere else to go but down.  
  
At the docks, now, the storm getting worse, slapping tender and frail human flesh around as though the weather itself is gripped by fury. The beam of a lighthouse sweeps the creaking wooden boards of the pier, the boardwalk. Peeling carnival posters advertising long-forgotten fairs and Fourth-of- July parties adorn the sides of the warehouses where once whales were massacred. In the sand beneath the pier and lining the boardwalk shadows, more prostitutes, but only boys this time, and not as pretty as the meat- market ones; these are cheaper and they know it, as they scan the choppy waters with searching, bruised eyes, goose-flesh shivering in the cold, waiting for their ships of famished sailors to come in.  
  
Some of them have their eyes turned, curiously, to the other end of the bay, cordoned off by tape and flashing red lights and soaked, tired, indifferent detectives and forensics teams, not one of whom could really give a damn about the corpse that just washed up on the gritty shore. It isn't as if this is a rare occurrence; it isn't even as if the crime deserves solving. They all know who did it anyway. They communicate it with their steely eyes, with glances that linger just a moment too long. A murder victim with a head twisted around backwards is, as far as they're concerned, no murder victim at all. John Doe him.Cause of death unknown. Tag him and bag him and let's all go home.  
  
Occasionally a boy from the boardwalk will try his luck with an officer or two; looking disgusted, the officers all push them away, but the boys don't mind: many of them, they know, will be back as soon as their buddies aren't around. One boy, leaning against the guardrail a few feet away, mockingly sings the chorus to "Watching The Detectives"; his friend giggles.  
  
The dock workers and fishermen, all sinew and muscle and naval tattoos, arrive at the pier; taking only a cursory glance at the crime scene a few feet away, the sight utterly familiar by now, they swiftly get to work, mooring the fishing boats, setting up the lobster cages, heaving great wooden crates onto waiting crafts. What these crates contain, they'll never tell, so long as they get their percentage on the other side of the river.  
  
The flash of the lighthouse beam illuminates a house perched hawklike on the edge of a nearby cliff, a post-modern monstrosity constructed out of gray concrete, all sharp angles and quiet menace, coiled power. On occasion, one or another of the detectives will glance up at this house. What appears to be the shadow of an enormous and deathly still figure stands before the large picture window, watching, obscured by the raindrops spattering on the glass. After a while spent just standing there, not moving, it reaches over and slowly draws the curtains.  
  
And across the way, just out of the corner of your eye, you think you can catch a glimpse of something blue and black, perched on the rooftop of one of the warehouses. Turning around, it is gone. A trick of the light, perhaps.  
  
Never mind. Don't trouble yourself about it. Why ask why? There is no more to explain, nothing left to discover in this town. You may think that there really ought to be a moral to the story, but there can be no moral, just as there is no story. There is only the rain, endless and black and spiralling down, down, into the depths of the ocean, where nothing will be heard, and no one will be saved, and everything you know will be forgotten. 


End file.
